a moment of clarity

A new trade

Selwyn has had the most convoluted professions out of all my characters.

He was born a miner/JC and did rather well flying around Northrend swinging his little pick axe while waiting for raids to form.

But then we (Tir and I) got the bright idea of having a tailor of each cloth type within our combined stable of characters.

His priest was already shadow, my mage was spell, just needed moon.

It was always a little nervewracking on a PvP server to be a little heal-spec priest in the middle of nowhere distracted by a dot and being unsuspecting prey to just about anyone that wandered by.

I don’t recall ever being attacked, but it still made for some nervous times.

About this time I pulled off my 66 to 80 leveling of a DK in one day, I now had a miner on the server to supplement my JC.

And so I handed over the controls one day and let Tir knock himself out powerleveling tailoring in place of my mining.

Now I’ve got spiffy carpets to cruise on and I get to pick up all sorts of extra cloth (which did transition over into Cataclysm).

It felt a little odd.

I’ve never been one to swap professions out willy-nilly, I’m not *that* much of a hardcore player.

(Pay no attention to the fact that I’m raiding 5+ nights a week.)

But somehow in all the pre-Cataclysm excitement, we completely and totally missed that they were removing cloth specializations.

So the big patch drops…

And I have 2 tailors.

One that knows a gabillion recipes and one that knows the bare minimum.

Arioch starts ribbing Selwyn about being a useless copycat and I start to feel a little ashamed when my mount macro picks a flying carpet for Selwyn.

So I pondered.

And fretted.

I knew I needed (and wanted) to drop tailoring for another profession.

But which one?

My priest obviously still has JC and I’m not too keen on the idea of going back to mining.

I already have tailoring and enchanting down on Arioch. I’ve worked long and hard on obtaining recipes that are completely irrelevant to anyone’s interests but my own.

Kaayn is my farmer. I feel a little more secure swooping down on nodes in plate than I did in a robe. And since he’s currently unholy, I also have a pet that is occasionally useful and can occupy any nearby mobs for me while I grab the goods.

My paladin is hanging out at 55 and churns out as many glyphs as he can. He’s an herbalist, too, not that it matters since he never leaves Dalaran.

(Total tangent, but did you know you can double-click on a character name on the selection screen instead of selecting and clicking Enter World? I just found that out by accident. Wrong character, of course.)

I have a few baby characters, mostly farmers, one that wase planning on alchemy to stock my raiding toons with flasks.

My druid is skinning and leatherworking and is the only character that really needs the leather gear or the skins.

My warrior will most likely go blacksmithing if he ever sees end game.

This is a raiding character, so I should look at professions that benefit raiding.

I settled on either Engineering (which I have on no toons yet) or alchemy (which I don’t have on a toon about 25 yet).

More pondering commenced.

Exploding sheep would be a ton of fun and the nitro boosts would come in handy in so many places…

But ultimately I decided on the convenience of making my own flasks, having them last for double time, and being able to create the guild cauldrons – which are BoP. Not to mention, being able to transmute my own gems would be pretty neato.

So off to the Alchemy leveling guide at wow-professions.com.

I wrote down the list of all the herbs I would need, saddled up Kaayn and rode off to spend the day farming.

I picked up a crap ton of ore while I was out, a few drops, some odds and ends, and of course some extra herbs,

Packaged up the herbs to Selwyn and went to bed.

Got up the next morning and started dutifully grinding out 50 of this and 10 of that and 20 of those.

Double-check against the guide to see where I should be… should be 105.

Hmmm… I’m only 101.

Fuck me.

And so commenced several hours of bouncing between characters, scratching together enough herbs of the appropriate varieties to make up for gaps in the guide. Not to mention, I fucked up once and didn’t realize that one recipe was going to cross the training threshold, so there was a few points wasted to the profession cap.

Oh, and a field trip to Tanaris to get my recipe for the philosopher’s stone because silly me thought that would be trainable. (No alchemist above level 25, remember?) (AND as soon as I land and try to mount up, I hear a snarky little voice telling me I can’t use that item. My flying carpets are still in my mount selection pane, mocking me, and my mount add on tried to use one.)

So I go to pull some purple lotus out of my guild bank to make my stone, I have all sorts of lotus tucked away… Frost, Black, Fel… fuck me again. No purple.

Back to Kaayn to tour Felwood in hopes of finding some purple lotus… which thankfully went very smoothly and I had my handful of lotus within 5 minutes.

And then the guide says to buy 4 Primal Might. 1 on the AH for 450g. Fuck that, I’ll just make them. Except the recipe is in Shatt. And I can’t make them at the level that it wants me to be at to go get my specialization.

So off to Shatt to get that recipe and then to Blade’s Edge for the super mana potion recipe, made the primal might (yes, I had primals in my gbank, just waiting for something like this), and then to Netherstorm to get my specialization…

At this point, I had access to more Northrend herbs than the guide needed me to have so I sort of just winged it from here. Thank god the transmute cooldowns were removed.

I lied, there’s actually a CD on the Northrend epic quality transmutes. And I need to do 5 to get the Cardinal Ruby one. Fuck.

Well, we can come back to that later.

Off to the DK to farm even more herbs.

MANY hours later, I hit 525 alchemy. My JC isn’t even 525 yet. /sigh

And just as I thought this would be a short process to powerlevel my alchemy after gathering all the herbs, so too I thought this would be a short post.

Yeah, the plan was to get to Cata-level and then level as my DK picked stuff up… that didn’t happen. I got reminded that I needed to be able to make the flasks to get the Mixology benefit so I had to get up to 520 anyway… blech.

Powerleveling professions – never seems to work for me. Yeah, I often have the cash, but man, my RL wallet begins to burn when I spend in-game gold to do something like that. Well, I don’t really have the characters to pull it off, so they tend to stick with the professions they started with. (Altis has its benefits, even if they only level to 20.)

Best part? I turned a profit on this. My DK is a miner as well as an herbalist so I grabbed every node I found of both herbs and ore. I had to purchase a couple of patterns and the vials for making the potions, but that cost was minimal compared to the stacks and stacks of ore I unloaded on the AH.

I’ve had issues with powerleveling professions for much the same reason as you–I got enough to match the guide and then was several points short. But I think alchemy is a better choice than engineering although I think exploding boots would be fun!

On the other hand, please keep posting! I’m away at school so I don’t get to play nearly as much as I want to and I get my WoW fix from reading your posts! So know that your stuff–no matter the length–is appreciated! Best of luck from me to you!